Category Archives: Fairness

That Seems Fair: The Impact of Changing Justice Perceptions over Time (IO Psychology)

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Topic: Fairness
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (JUL 2011)
Article: Justice as a Dynamic Construct: Effects of Individual Trajectories on Distal Work Outcomes
Authors: Hausknecht, J. P., Sturman, M. C., & Roberson, Q. M.
Reviewed By: Thaddeus Rada

Organizational justice continues to play a prominent role in the science and practice of IO psychology. Many readers are probably familiar with some of the basic types of organizational justice, such as procedural, interactional, and distributive justice. However, although much research on justice (and injustice) in organizations has been conducted, the interactive effect of time and justice perceptions on important employee outcomes has not been addressed. In a recent paper, John Hausknecht and colleagues begin to address this gap in the literature.

The importance of understanding the interaction of justice perceptions with time can be understood with an example used by the authors of the current article. If an organization is interested in understanding the relationship between justice perceptions and some outcome, such as turnover intentions, measuring justice perceptions at only one point in time misses out on crucial information that measurement at multiple time points can give us. Two employees may report identical justice perceptions at the present time, but if one employee’s perceptions were very high six months ago, while the other employee’s were very low, the implications of this difference are obviously important. Despite their equivalent levels of current justice perceptions, the first employee may be substantially more likely to leave the organization, since their perceptions have decreased a great deal, which the other employee’s perceptions have increased.

Utilizing a sample of over 500 employees, the authors found support for all three of their hypotheses: namely, that employees who reported a positive justice trend were more satisfied, more committed to the organization, and likely to have lower turnover intentions, relative to employees that reported a negative justice trend over time. This research highlights the important role that time can play in our measurement and assessment of justice perceptions (and other constructs more generally). Practitioners might take findings such as these into account when conducting assessments in organizations, by obtaining measurements at multiple time periods in order to gain an understanding of how trends and changes in the levels of variables impacts important organizational outcomes.

Hausknecht, J. P., Sturman, M. C., & Roberson, Q. M. (2011). Justice as a dynamic construct: Effects of individual trajectories on distal work outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96, 872-880.

human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management


source for picture: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Other_Objects_g271-Balance_p11750.html

What’s the Time? The Role of Temporal Perspective in Justice Concerns (Human Resource Management)

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Topic: Fairness, Human Resource Management
Publication: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (SEP 2011)
Article: Seeing the “Forest” or the “Trees” of Organizational Justice: Effects of Temporal Perspective on Employee Concerns about Unfair Treatment at Work
Authors: Cojuharenco, I., Patient, D., & Bashshur, M. R.
Reviewed By: Thaddeus Rada

Concerns about employee’s perceptions of organizational justice have been a point of emphasis for practitioners working in IO psychology and human resource management in recent years. Organizational justice is typically divided into several types, including interactional, procedural, and distributive justice, but the same basic concept underlies them all: the concern that employees have for being treated fairly.

Although previous work has evaluated a number of influences and outcomes associated with organizational justice, relatively little attention has been paid to the role that time may play in organizational justice issues. As such, a recent series of studies by Cojuharenco and colleagues evaluated this relationship. Specifically, they assessed the impact that temporal perspectives (whether someone is thinking of how they feel currently, versus how they felt in the past, etc.) play of employee’s perceptions of justice. Overall, the authors found that past-focused individuals exhibited greater concern over unfair treatment by others (interpersonal justice), while future-focused individuals exhibited greater concern over unfair outcomes (distributive justice).

One explanation for this phenomenon may be that people have more opportunities to “smooth the waters” with people that they have a procedural justice-related issue with, while the injustice associated with a distributive justice-related issue usually remains unchanged over time. Whatever the reason, it is worth remembering that time can have an important impact on the relevance of different types of injustice, and organizations would be well-advised to consider the types of justice that are most likely to be important to employees in a given situation.

Cojuharenco, I., Patient, D., & Bashshur, M. R. (2011). Seeing the “forest” or the “trees” of organizational justice: Effect of temporal perspective on employee concerns about unfair treatment at work. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 116, 17-31.

human resource management,organizational industrial psychology, organizational management

Do HRM Practices Lead to Satisfaction? Depends on Employee Entitlement

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Topic: Fairness, Strategic HR, Job Satisfaction

Publication: Journal of Business and Psychology (MAR 2011)

Article: Trait Entitlement and Perceived Favorability of Human Resource Management Practices in the Prediction of Job Satisfaction

Authors: Z. S. Byrne, B. K. Miller, V. E. Pitts

Reviewed By: Lauren A. Wood

Images The use of human resource management (HRM) practices has gained popularity within organizations due to their perceived success as a competitive advantage for attracting and retaining the most qualified individuals. Past research suggests that job satisfaction is a key outcome in this relationship. Specifically, favorable perceptions of the organization’s HRM practices tend to increase employee perceptions of job satisfaction.

However, this statement should not be used to blanket all employees—job satisfaction theories suggest that an employee’s perceptions of job satisfaction results from an appraisal of what others are receiving from the company vs. what he or she is getting from the company. Here, an individual difference in equity sensitivity may come into play. Equity sensitivity concerns the degree to which people vary on their level of entitlement in the workplace (benevolent or having a lower need for rewards compared to coworkers, equity sensitive or desiring an equal amount of rewards, entitled or preferring more awards than coworkers). The authors of the current study suggest that the favorability of HRM practices—job satisfaction relationship will be moderated by each employee’s degree of entitlement.

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The Relationship Between Weight and Salary: Bad News For All Kinds of People

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Topic: Fairness, Gender, Selection

Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (JAN 2011)

Article: When It Comes to Pay, Do the Thin Win? The Effect of Weight on Pay for Men and Women

Authors: T.A. Judge, D.M. Cable

Reviewed By: Ben Sher

Images Does career success have anything to do with what you look like?  According to a recent study by Judge and Cable (2011), the answer is yes. 

From the same people who explained that height may influence salary (Judge & Cable, 2004), now it seems weight can also influence salary.  Drawing from cultivation theory, or the idea that people are slowly drawn to accept social norms promoted by the media, they say it literally pays to be the “ideal” weight. 

So what exactly is the “ideal” weight?  Not surprisingly, the answer is different for men and women.  The authors say underweight men are actually punished with smaller salaries, presumably because they have violated gender-role norms by being too skinny.  Men are paid more with increased weight, up to the point of obesity, when salaries start to gradually decline.  For women, a very different pattern emerged.  Underweight women had the highest salaries, and salaries decreased with additional weight gain. 

But not all weight gain is equal.  In one study, the salary decrease between average versus underweight women was twice the decrease between average weight women and overweight women.  According to the researchers, this is because the media has long been portraying increasingly thinner women as being ideally attractive, and the workplace has discriminated accordingly.  Once women violate this ideal and become average weight, they may already be seen as “letting themselves go” so any further weight gain isn’t as detrimental.  

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Is Bad Behavior from an Employee the Consequence of an Unfulfilled Organizational Promise?

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Topic: Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Fairness, Trust, Workplace Deviance

Publication: Journal of Business and Psychology (WINTER 2010) 

Article: Psychological contracts and counterproductive work behaviors: employee responses to transactional and relational breach

Authors: J.M. Jensen, R.A. Opland, and A.M. Ryan

Reviewed By: Allison B. Siminovsky

Images Counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) are those actions undertaken by the employee that are detrimental to the overall work environment.  The reasons for engaging in such behaviors and the means of expressing them differ from situation to situation, and as a result it can be difficult for organizations to pinpoint exactly what the causes of CWBs may be.  This article seeks to find antecedents for CWBs in organizational breaches of the psychological contract, or the employee’s inherent expectations about how the reciprocal relationship between employer and employee ought to be.   In other words, does deviant workplace behavior result from perceived organizational injustices and mistreatment?

The current study examines the possibility of numerous types of CWBs occurring as the result of a perceived breach of the psychological contract and achieved several significant findings.  For example, it was found that when employees are moved to retaliate to feeling a lost sense of their employers caring about them, they are most likely to engage in abuse behaviors, which include threatening and undermining one’s co-workers. 

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Do Organizations Ask What They Shouldn’t Ask in Job Applications?

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Topic: Fairness, Recruiting

Publication: International Journal of Selection and Assessment (DEC 2010)

Article: Science-practice gap in e-recruitment

Authors: A.L. Garcia-Izquierdo, H. Aguinis, and P.J. Ramos-Villagrasa

Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

Images The gap between the science of HR and its practice in actual organizations is well known.  Sometimes, the practice of HR outpaces the research (e.g., organizations implement systems that are “hot” in the popular press, but not well understood or under researched), while in other cases, the practice of HR lags well behind the research…and sometimes even the law!

In a recent study, Garcia-Izquierdo et al. (2010) analyzed online job applications of over 60 publicly traded organizations – first in Spain in 2005, and again in 2009.  According to the authors, Spain provides a natural setting to study the science-practice gap in IO psychology because employment legislation regarding Equal Employment Opportunity is still ongoing (unlike in the U.S.).  Specifically, these dates were chosen due to recent legislation changes in 2007 (e.g., an Act prohibiting sex-based discrimination).  

Common information that was required of job applicants included age or date of birth, nationality, gender, marital status and place of birth.  About 20% of companies in 2005 even asked job applicants for personal photographs (this increased to 25% in 2009).  Overall, the percentages of companies asking applicants for such information did not change significantly from 2005 to 2009. 

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If You Want to Prevent Exhaustion … Don’t Worry, Be Happy!

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Topic:  Stress, Burnout, Performance, Fairness, Compensation

Publication: Journal of Organizational Behavior

Article: Emotional exhaustion and job performance: The moderating role of distributive justice and positive affect (AUG 2010)

Author: O. Janssen, C. K. Lam, & X. Huang

Reviewed by: Sarah Teague

Images Sometimes work is just exhausting; emotionally exhausting to be specific. Emotional exhaustion (EE) refers to feeling overwhelmed or drained at work. Not surprisingly, recent research has linked EE to decrements in performance through the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory. COR theory suggests that EE impairs performance because employees feel that they do not have the adequate resources to meet the current job demands, but is this always the case? When an employee begins to feel depleted, do they automatically attribute it to lack of personal resources? The authors of the current article suggest not.

The current study used COR and justice attributions (i.e. internal vs. external explanation for an event) to further explain how emotional exhaustion impacts job performance. Specifically, the authors proposed that emotional exhaustion will have a greater negative impact on performance when perceived distributive justice (DJ; adequate compensation for effort expended) is high. They reason that when DJ is high, employees attribute their depletion to personal inadequacies (internal) rather than poor compensation (external).

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Want teamwork? Then get pride – with fair treatment and leaders who demonstrate the right values

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Topic: Fairness, Leadership, Teams

Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (NOV 2010)

Article: Cooperating when “you” and “I” are treated fairly: The moderating role of leader prototypicality

Authors:  David De Cremer, Marius van Dijke, and David M. Mayer

Reviewed By: Bobby Bullock

Handshake More and more research is examining how teams work together to achieve common goals.  One aspect of teams that is important for successful outcomes is the extent to which team members engage in cooperative behavior (rather than self centered).   A new model presented by De Cremer, Van Duke, and Mayer (2010) indicates that cooperation amongst team members is highest when a) members feel that both they and their fellow members are receiving procedurally fair treatment from their leader, and b) the leader him/herself embodies the team’s values and norms.  While that may seem like a mouthful, listen up: this new research may just provide that extra piece that’s missing from your teamwork puzzle.

It’s definitely a good thing for an employee to feel that he or she is being treated fairly, but sometimes that is not enough.  De Cremer et al. (2010) found that individual cooperation was highest when an employee felt that the team leader treated both her and her coworkers with procedural fairness (i.e., allowing all to express their views, consistent application of procedures).  However, this effect was only significant when the leader herself was perceived as a prototypical leader (i.e., a leader that represents a group’s ideal values and identity).  In comparison, when leaders did not represent group norms, their expression of procedural fairness led to much lower cooperation.

Why is this?  One word was thrown around to explain these effects… pride!  When all employees in a group are treated fairly by a leader that embodies ideal values, pride is arguably at its strongest and so is the degree of cooperation and helping behaviors among team members. 

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Third-Party Reactions to Injustice at Work

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Topic: Fairness

Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (SEP 2010)

Article: Dual processing and organizational justice: The role of rational versus experiential processing in third-party reactions to workplace mistreatment

Authors: Daniel Skarlicki and Deborah Rupp

Reviewed By: Bobby Bullock


Images Any time an employee is a victim of mistreatment, there are a myriad of individuals who can become aware, including friends, co-workers, and even strangers.  And when it comes to justice in the workplace, even employees that are not directly mistreated can become motivated to inflict retribution.  This can happen even if they are completely unaffected by the event.  Why?  The deontic model of justice (Cropanzano, Goldman, & Folger, 2003) proposes that when people become aware of the mistreatment of others, they can experience very real and sometimes strong negative emotions.  It is proposed that this reaction is due to the violation of social and moral “norms” of behavior.  A recent study by Skarlicki and Rupp (2010) explored factors that could affect this tendency for third-parties to carry out justice and retribution on behalf of a mistreated coworker.  What they found was this:  third-party employees who process the event on an emotional, “gut” level are more likely to react to an injustice than their rational counterparts.  However, if someone has a strong Moral Identity (e.g., sees him/herself as highly moral – kind, honest, etc.), they are more likely to react regardless of whether they are intuitive versus logical.  For details of the study, read on:

First, the researchers examined if the use of a particular “processing frame” over another would moderate a third-party’s reaction to injustice.  Processing frames are essentially ways to process information and can include experiential processing and rational processing.  Experiential processing happens at a more subconscious level, and includes people’s emotional and “gut” responses as information on which to base future behavior.  Rational processing happens in the more conscious, or deliberative part of the mind.  It involves the use of logic and the weighing of evidence to make decisions and guide behavior.  Skarlicki and Rupp (2010) found that people who were primed to be open to their intuition and feelings were much more likely to seek retribution against someone who mistreated another person (a fictional stranger in this case) than those primed to think rationally and analytically.

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Cheated Employees: Less Organizational Commitment and Less Creativity

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Topic: Fairness, Organizational Commitment,
Creativity

Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (July,
2010)

Article: Psychological Contract Breaches,
Organizational Commitment, and Innovation-Related Behaviors: A Latent Growth
Modeling Approach

Authors: T.W.H. Ng, D.C. Feldman, S.S.K. Lam

Reviewed By: Ben Sher

 


ImagesOkay, here’s the
deal.  Employees make assumptions
about what they owe their employers and what their employers owe them in return.  This is called a psychological
contract.  According to Ng,
Feldman, and Lam (2010), when employees think this psychological contract is
being violated, they may feel less organizational commitment and become less
innovative.

So what does happen when employees feel
bamboozled?  According to the
authors, two things happen.  First,
employees will naturally begin to feel less emotional attachment to the
company.  This is not revenge; it’s
just an inevitable emotional reaction. 
Secondly, employees will indeed have some interest in getting back at
the employer as long as they can keep their jobs.

That sounds
ominous.  So, what do the employees
do about it?  Basically, they
become less creative.  The authors
explain that there are two ways an employee can be creative on the job.  Employees can solve problems and they
can implement ideas.  Problem
solving is difficult to measure, so instead the authors measured idea
implementation.  They defined this
as anytime an employee shared a new idea with a colleague or superior, or
anytime an employee either worked to implement those new ideas or helped others
to implement them.  When employees
perceived psychological breaches, they ended up engaging in less of these
innovative behaviors.  Because the
study included employees from a wide variety of jobs, the authors concluded
that the complexity of the job makes no difference, and innovation will always
suffer.

A key finding of this
study is that this decrease in innovation continued over time.  Employers may mistakenly think that
breaking psychological contracts won’t have lasting consequences and that
employees will eventually forgive and forget.  This is a mistake. 
Because the authors were able to identify the role psychological
contract breaches have in reducing organizational commitment, or the overall
attitude employees have towards their employers, it is easy to understand how
innovation will continue to decrease over the long run.  Employers should be warned of these
consequences, and should be encouraged to fix the situation and give employees
what they believe they are owed.   

Ng, T.W.H., & Feldman, D.C.,
& Lam, S.S.K. (2010). 
Psychological Contract Breaches, Organizational Commitment, and
Innovation-Related Behaviors: A Latent Growth Modeling Approach. Journal of
Applied Psychology,
95, 744-751.